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https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nuc...x-heres-how-the-government-plans-to-cover-it/
Nuclear Arsenal
How a $5 part used to modernize nuclear warheads could cost $850 million to fix
By: Aaron Mehta September 25
Charles Verdon, the head of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, talks with Defense News about delays to the B61-12 nuclear bomb.
WASHINGTON — Issues with commercial parts on two nuclear warhead modernization projects could cost up to $850 million to fix, but the agency in charge of America’s warheads believes it has a solution.
Speaking at a House Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Charles Verdon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the costs associated with replacing commercial parts on the B61-12 and W88 Alteration 370 warhead programs could be recouped by savings found in future modernization activities.
The issue, first revealed by Verdon during the Sept. 4 Defense News Conference, would put both warhead modernization programs at an 18- to 20-month delay of their first production units, although NNSA is hopeful there won’t be significant delays on the overall program timelines.
The parts in question are commercially available capacitors that, during stress testing, did not give NNSA confidence they could survive the 20-30 years needed for these designs. Verdon stressed that the parts were not at risk of failure under normal circumstances, but that the agency was acting out of an abundance of caution for the long-term life of the weapons.
That caution is pricey: the Original capacitors, Verdon said, ran about $5 per unit. The upgraded ones, built to a higher standard NNSA believes can survive the lifetime of the programs, come in at $75 per unit. All told, the B61-12 will cost an extra $600-700 million, and the W88 will cost about $120-$150 million because of the capacitor issue.
Verdon’s hope is that lessons learned from these issues can be applied to “design simplifications” on modernization efforts on two warheads, the 80-4 and the W87-1, and allow NNSA to bring costs down on those programs in the long term.
Those savings, combined with built-in contingency funding for delays, should mean that even as the B61 and W88 programs experience cost increases, the whole warhead portfolio will be neutral from an increased-cost perspective. In other words, the two programs furthest along now need an increase of funding in the short term, but those investments should lead to savings down the road to balance it out.
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“That is going to be our approach: to not request any increase to the bottom line of the modernization effort but to balance it within the modernization portfolio,” he said, before telling the subcommittee chair, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., that he hopes to have more fidelity on that in the coming year. Verdon added that any funding increases would come in fiscal 2021, not through a reprogramming request for fiscal 2020.
The B61-12 program, which will replace the B61-3, -4, -7 and -10 nuclear gravity bomb variants with a new warhead design, is expected by NNSA to cost $8.25 billion over the life-extension program.
The upgraded variant will be certified on the B-2, the future B-21, America’s F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft, and British and German Tornado aircraft under a NATO agreement. The F-35 is expected to go through certification on the weapon at some point in the next decade.
The W88 Alteration 370 is meant to replace the arming, fuzing and firing subsystem for the W88 warhead for the Trident II sub-launched ballistic missile. NNSA estimates the cost of that system at about $2.7 billion.
The capacitor issue has raised a broader question of how NNSA deals with commercial off-the-shelf technologies. During the Cold War, roughly 70 percent of NNSA warhead parts were made in-house; that figure has entirely flipped now, with 70 percent of parts now commercial off-the-shelf. That comes with new challenges that the agency, which has not run a major warhead modernization effort in years, didn’t anticipate.
“What we didn’t recognize, and one of the lessons we’ve learned, is the variability that can exist even within a given vendor just between different lots. If you buy components and get different lots, there can be variability in how they are produced,” Verdon told the subcommittee. He said that the agency “underestimated” how much variability there can be, and said the agency is reviewing how it inspects and works with off-the-shelf components to be more rigorous about quality.
Asked by Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., whether the agency needs to consider bringing more production in-house, Verdon acknowledged it was something under discussion.
“We’re improving our interactions with the vendors themselves. We’re trying to make sure vendors understand our requirements very early in the process,” he said. “In some case the vendors want to work with us and will actually improve their processes to meet our requirements. We’re going to look at it on a part-by-part basis. For those parts vendors that will have a hard time [meeting those requirements], we would look to bring those back in house.”
An Air Force F-16C carries an inert B61 on March 14, 2017. (Staff Sgt. Brandi Hansen/U.S. Air Force)
‘No sacred cows’
While NNSA may be challenged in the short term with the B61-12, the Department of Defense is making progress on its portion of the weapon, including the development and procurement of new tail kits for the bomb.
On Tuesday evening, NNSA announced that a trio of bomb tests in August were successful, setting up a final demonstration test in 2020 with an F-16 jet. And last week, Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said he is “very happy” with how the tail kit was progressing.
“So far, I think the releases went as we wanted them to,” Ray said at the Air Force Association’s annual conference. “That is an [Air Combat Command] test, technically not a Global Strike test as all the test business stays there, but I was there last week and my feedback was there were three good releases.”
While the witnesses at the subcommittee did not face hard questions from lawmakers during the public portion of the hearing, the subpanel did open on a tense note, with ranking member Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, making it clear he was at the hearing under protest.
“I want to express my disappointment that we’re even having this hearing. We have a longstanding tradition in our committee that we don’t have hearings, public hearings especially, on issues being considered in conference,” Turner said, noting that the future of both warheads is part of the FY20 budget negotiations now underway.
“The only reason we must be in public is for [Democrats] to have some difficult discussions about support for our nuclear deterrent,” Turner said. “This is a disappointment. This is continued politicization of the process of this committee that we’ve seen throughout this year.”
Cooper, after allowing opening statements from the witnesses, replied that “the purpose of this hearing today is just to watch over taxpayer dollars. We have an obligation, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to make sure it is properly spent, and anytime there is a delay or cost overrun, I think it’s worthy of note.”
“There are vitally important programs for America, but there are no sacred cows, so we need to make sure 18-month, two-year delays, cost overruns can be better understood so they can be avoided in the future,” Cooper added.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...-replace-a-5-part-in-revamped-nuclear-weapons
U.S. To Spend Hundreds Of Millions To Replace A $5 Part In Revamped Nuclear Weapons
Issues with the commercial capacitors, meant to help save money, have now caused more than a year of new delays for both of these programs.
By Joseph TrevithickSeptember 26, 2019
Sandia National Laboratories
SHARE
Concerns about the reliability of commercial-off-the-shelf capacitors, each of which cost just $5, the Department of Energy had been planning to use in two future nuclear warhead designs will delay both programs by at least a year and a half and could result in up to a whopping $850 million in additional costs. The W88 ALT 370 warheads for the U.S. Navy's Trident D5 submarine-launch ballistics missiles and the U.S. Air Force B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs, the latter of which are already set to be worth literally twice their weight in gold each, are seeing impacts from the decision to switch to a more robust piece of circuitry.
Charles Verdon, the Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), informed members of Congress of the issue during a hearing on Sept. 25, 2019. NNSA oversees the development, construction, and dismantlement of U.S. nuclear weapons. The W88 ALT 370 is an upgrade for existing W88 warheads that reportedly consists of improved arming, fuzing, and firing components. The B61-12 is a modernized variant of the B61 family of nuclear gravity bombs that leverages warheads from older B61-4 bombs and various components from those weapons, as well as from B61-3s, -7s, and -10s. It also adds a precision guidance tail kit. The B61-12s, which you can read about in much more detail in this past War Zone feature, will replace these older B61s, and potentially other nuclear bombs.
Pentagon's New Nuclear Strategy Is Unsustainable And A Handout To Defense IndustryBy Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
B-2 Flies First 'End-To-End' Tests With New Nuclear Bomb Amid Growing Cost ConcernsBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Get To Know America's Long Serving B61 Family Of Nuclear BombsBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
U.S. Ballistic Missile Sub Fired An Impressive Four Trident II Missiles In Just Three DaysBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The Time When A Burning B-52 Nearly Caused A Nuclear Catastrophe "Worse than Chernobyl"By Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The W88 ALT 370 and B61-12 designs both used the same commercial capacitors in an effort to help control costs. Verdon insisted to legislators that there was no indication that these components would fail under normal circumstances.
USN
USS Rhode Island fires a Trident II missile during a test in May 2019.
"Early tests on the capacitors now in question and subsequent tests including component, major assembly, and full-up integrated system flight tests demonstrated that these components meet requirement today," Verdon told lawmakers. "Industry best practices were used to stress the components beyond their design planned usage as a way to establish confidence that they will continue to work over the necessary lifetime of the warhead. During stress testing, a few of these commercially available capacitors did not meet the reliability requirements."
This, in turn, shook NNSA's confidence that all of the capacitors would be able to work reliably across the expected life cycles of the W88 ALT 370s and B61-12s. These weapons are expected to remain in the active stockpile for at least between 20 and 30 years after they enter service. The U.S. Air Force had hoped to receive its first examples of the B61-12 next year. It's unclear when the Navy might have originally expected to start getting the W88 ALT 370s, but NNSA had planned to finish construction of the first of these upgraded warheads by the end of this year.
NNSA is now replacing the $5 capacitors with new, more robust ones that cost around $75 each. Verdon said that this could add between $120 and $150 million to the total cost of the W88 ALT 370 program and between $600 and $700 million to the B61-12 effort. He warned that the combined costs could potentially rise to more than a billion, depending on how the process goes. Each of these programs is now facing its own schedule delay of between 18 and 20 months, as a result.
The W88 ALT 370 program's total estimated cost is already around $2.7 billion. The total price tag for the B61-12 bombs is around $8.25 billion, with another $1.1 billion for the new precision guidance tail kits.
“What we didn’t recognize, and one of the lessons we’ve learned, is the variability [in quality control] that can exist even within a given vendor just between different lots," Verdon explained. "If you buy components and get different lots, there can be variability in how they are produced."
NNSA is now separately reviewing its procedures for acquiring and inspecting commercial-of-the-shelf components and is in discussions with vendors about ways to obtain more consistent quality in parts destined for nuclear weapons. "We’re going to look at it on a part-by-part basis. For those parts vendors that will have a hard time [meeting the requirements], we would look to bring those back in house," he added, referring to the more costly option of the U.S. government re-taking responsibility for custom building certain components.
Verdon also told legislators that NNSA had been able to leverage its experiences with the W88 ALT 370 and B61-12 programs to produce "design simplifications" on the future W80-4 and W87-1 warheads. The W80-4 is a life-extension upgrade for existing W80s found in the Air Force's AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM) and it will also be used in the service's future air-launched Long Range Stand Off (LRSO) cruise missiles. The W87-1 is a similar effort for W87 warheads, which are presently found on some Air Force LGM-30G Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and are set to go atop the future Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) ICBMs. NNSA hopes this will lead to new cost savings that will help offset the issues with the W88 ALT 370s and B61-12s.
USAF
US Air Force personnel work on an LGM-30G Minuteman ICBM in its silo.
Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear weapons, any cost savings have to be balanced against the absolute need for the best possible safety and surety features. With America's nuclear enterprise, this is called the concept of "Always/Never," which refers to the desire for nuclear weapons to always function when you want them to and never when you don't.
Design flaws with multiple nuclear weapon configurations meant a number of already harrowing accidents during the Cold War could have been particularly catastrophic. One of these incidents, a 1980 fire in the engine of a B-52 loaded with nuclear weapons sitting on alert at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, was one turn of the wind away from becoming "worse than Chernobyl," according to Dr. Roger Batzel, then-director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL. You can read more about this particular accident in this recent War Zone feature.
For the time being, the capacitor issue has not had any larger impacts on the futures of W88 ALT 370 or B61-12 programs. However, “there are vitally important programs for America, but there are no sacred cows, so we need to make sure 18-month, two year delays, cost overruns can be better understood so they can be avoided in the future," Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee and Chair of the House Armed Forces Committee's Strategic Forces Subcommittee, warned during the hearing.
Congress is already engaged in an intense debate about modernizing America's nuclear arsenal, broadly, which is expected to cost a whopping $1.5 trillion over the next three decades. As such, it is very possible that we will see additional changes to the character of both the W88 ALT 370 and B61-12 programs now that their schedules for both have grown by more than a year.
Contact the author: [email protected]
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Nuclear Arsenal
How a $5 part used to modernize nuclear warheads could cost $850 million to fix
By: Aaron Mehta September 25
Charles Verdon, the head of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, talks with Defense News about delays to the B61-12 nuclear bomb.
WASHINGTON — Issues with commercial parts on two nuclear warhead modernization projects could cost up to $850 million to fix, but the agency in charge of America’s warheads believes it has a solution.
Speaking at a House Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Charles Verdon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said the costs associated with replacing commercial parts on the B61-12 and W88 Alteration 370 warhead programs could be recouped by savings found in future modernization activities.
The issue, first revealed by Verdon during the Sept. 4 Defense News Conference, would put both warhead modernization programs at an 18- to 20-month delay of their first production units, although NNSA is hopeful there won’t be significant delays on the overall program timelines.
The parts in question are commercially available capacitors that, during stress testing, did not give NNSA confidence they could survive the 20-30 years needed for these designs. Verdon stressed that the parts were not at risk of failure under normal circumstances, but that the agency was acting out of an abundance of caution for the long-term life of the weapons.
That caution is pricey: the Original capacitors, Verdon said, ran about $5 per unit. The upgraded ones, built to a higher standard NNSA believes can survive the lifetime of the programs, come in at $75 per unit. All told, the B61-12 will cost an extra $600-700 million, and the W88 will cost about $120-$150 million because of the capacitor issue.
Verdon’s hope is that lessons learned from these issues can be applied to “design simplifications” on modernization efforts on two warheads, the 80-4 and the W87-1, and allow NNSA to bring costs down on those programs in the long term.
Those savings, combined with built-in contingency funding for delays, should mean that even as the B61 and W88 programs experience cost increases, the whole warhead portfolio will be neutral from an increased-cost perspective. In other words, the two programs furthest along now need an increase of funding in the short term, but those investments should lead to savings down the road to balance it out.
Sign up for our Early Bird Brief
Get the defense industry's most comprehensive news and information straight to your inbox
“That is going to be our approach: to not request any increase to the bottom line of the modernization effort but to balance it within the modernization portfolio,” he said, before telling the subcommittee chair, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., that he hopes to have more fidelity on that in the coming year. Verdon added that any funding increases would come in fiscal 2021, not through a reprogramming request for fiscal 2020.
The B61-12 program, which will replace the B61-3, -4, -7 and -10 nuclear gravity bomb variants with a new warhead design, is expected by NNSA to cost $8.25 billion over the life-extension program.
The upgraded variant will be certified on the B-2, the future B-21, America’s F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft, and British and German Tornado aircraft under a NATO agreement. The F-35 is expected to go through certification on the weapon at some point in the next decade.
The W88 Alteration 370 is meant to replace the arming, fuzing and firing subsystem for the W88 warhead for the Trident II sub-launched ballistic missile. NNSA estimates the cost of that system at about $2.7 billion.
The capacitor issue has raised a broader question of how NNSA deals with commercial off-the-shelf technologies. During the Cold War, roughly 70 percent of NNSA warhead parts were made in-house; that figure has entirely flipped now, with 70 percent of parts now commercial off-the-shelf. That comes with new challenges that the agency, which has not run a major warhead modernization effort in years, didn’t anticipate.
“What we didn’t recognize, and one of the lessons we’ve learned, is the variability that can exist even within a given vendor just between different lots. If you buy components and get different lots, there can be variability in how they are produced,” Verdon told the subcommittee. He said that the agency “underestimated” how much variability there can be, and said the agency is reviewing how it inspects and works with off-the-shelf components to be more rigorous about quality.
Asked by Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., whether the agency needs to consider bringing more production in-house, Verdon acknowledged it was something under discussion.
“We’re improving our interactions with the vendors themselves. We’re trying to make sure vendors understand our requirements very early in the process,” he said. “In some case the vendors want to work with us and will actually improve their processes to meet our requirements. We’re going to look at it on a part-by-part basis. For those parts vendors that will have a hard time [meeting those requirements], we would look to bring those back in house.”
An Air Force F-16C carries an inert B61 on March 14, 2017. (Staff Sgt. Brandi Hansen/U.S. Air Force)
‘No sacred cows’
While NNSA may be challenged in the short term with the B61-12, the Department of Defense is making progress on its portion of the weapon, including the development and procurement of new tail kits for the bomb.
On Tuesday evening, NNSA announced that a trio of bomb tests in August were successful, setting up a final demonstration test in 2020 with an F-16 jet. And last week, Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, said he is “very happy” with how the tail kit was progressing.
“So far, I think the releases went as we wanted them to,” Ray said at the Air Force Association’s annual conference. “That is an [Air Combat Command] test, technically not a Global Strike test as all the test business stays there, but I was there last week and my feedback was there were three good releases.”
While the witnesses at the subcommittee did not face hard questions from lawmakers during the public portion of the hearing, the subpanel did open on a tense note, with ranking member Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, making it clear he was at the hearing under protest.
“I want to express my disappointment that we’re even having this hearing. We have a longstanding tradition in our committee that we don’t have hearings, public hearings especially, on issues being considered in conference,” Turner said, noting that the future of both warheads is part of the FY20 budget negotiations now underway.
“The only reason we must be in public is for [Democrats] to have some difficult discussions about support for our nuclear deterrent,” Turner said. “This is a disappointment. This is continued politicization of the process of this committee that we’ve seen throughout this year.”
Cooper, after allowing opening statements from the witnesses, replied that “the purpose of this hearing today is just to watch over taxpayer dollars. We have an obligation, as stewards of taxpayer dollars, to make sure it is properly spent, and anytime there is a delay or cost overrun, I think it’s worthy of note.”
“There are vitally important programs for America, but there are no sacred cows, so we need to make sure 18-month, two-year delays, cost overruns can be better understood so they can be avoided in the future,” Cooper added.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...-replace-a-5-part-in-revamped-nuclear-weapons
U.S. To Spend Hundreds Of Millions To Replace A $5 Part In Revamped Nuclear WeaponsIssues with the commercial capacitors, meant to help save money, have now caused more than a year of new delays for both of these programs.
By Joseph TrevithickSeptember 26, 2019
SHARE
Concerns about the reliability of commercial-off-the-shelf capacitors, each of which cost just $5, the Department of Energy had been planning to use in two future nuclear warhead designs will delay both programs by at least a year and a half and could result in up to a whopping $850 million in additional costs. The W88 ALT 370 warheads for the U.S. Navy's Trident D5 submarine-launch ballistics missiles and the U.S. Air Force B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs, the latter of which are already set to be worth literally twice their weight in gold each, are seeing impacts from the decision to switch to a more robust piece of circuitry.
Charles Verdon, the Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), informed members of Congress of the issue during a hearing on Sept. 25, 2019. NNSA oversees the development, construction, and dismantlement of U.S. nuclear weapons. The W88 ALT 370 is an upgrade for existing W88 warheads that reportedly consists of improved arming, fuzing, and firing components. The B61-12 is a modernized variant of the B61 family of nuclear gravity bombs that leverages warheads from older B61-4 bombs and various components from those weapons, as well as from B61-3s, -7s, and -10s. It also adds a precision guidance tail kit. The B61-12s, which you can read about in much more detail in this past War Zone feature, will replace these older B61s, and potentially other nuclear bombs.
Pentagon's New Nuclear Strategy Is Unsustainable And A Handout To Defense IndustryBy Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
B-2 Flies First 'End-To-End' Tests With New Nuclear Bomb Amid Growing Cost ConcernsBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Get To Know America's Long Serving B61 Family Of Nuclear BombsBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
U.S. Ballistic Missile Sub Fired An Impressive Four Trident II Missiles In Just Three DaysBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The Time When A Burning B-52 Nearly Caused A Nuclear Catastrophe "Worse than Chernobyl"By Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The W88 ALT 370 and B61-12 designs both used the same commercial capacitors in an effort to help control costs. Verdon insisted to legislators that there was no indication that these components would fail under normal circumstances.
USN
USS Rhode Island fires a Trident II missile during a test in May 2019.
"Early tests on the capacitors now in question and subsequent tests including component, major assembly, and full-up integrated system flight tests demonstrated that these components meet requirement today," Verdon told lawmakers. "Industry best practices were used to stress the components beyond their design planned usage as a way to establish confidence that they will continue to work over the necessary lifetime of the warhead. During stress testing, a few of these commercially available capacitors did not meet the reliability requirements."
This, in turn, shook NNSA's confidence that all of the capacitors would be able to work reliably across the expected life cycles of the W88 ALT 370s and B61-12s. These weapons are expected to remain in the active stockpile for at least between 20 and 30 years after they enter service. The U.S. Air Force had hoped to receive its first examples of the B61-12 next year. It's unclear when the Navy might have originally expected to start getting the W88 ALT 370s, but NNSA had planned to finish construction of the first of these upgraded warheads by the end of this year.
NNSA is now replacing the $5 capacitors with new, more robust ones that cost around $75 each. Verdon said that this could add between $120 and $150 million to the total cost of the W88 ALT 370 program and between $600 and $700 million to the B61-12 effort. He warned that the combined costs could potentially rise to more than a billion, depending on how the process goes. Each of these programs is now facing its own schedule delay of between 18 and 20 months, as a result.
The W88 ALT 370 program's total estimated cost is already around $2.7 billion. The total price tag for the B61-12 bombs is around $8.25 billion, with another $1.1 billion for the new precision guidance tail kits.
“What we didn’t recognize, and one of the lessons we’ve learned, is the variability [in quality control] that can exist even within a given vendor just between different lots," Verdon explained. "If you buy components and get different lots, there can be variability in how they are produced."
NNSA is now separately reviewing its procedures for acquiring and inspecting commercial-of-the-shelf components and is in discussions with vendors about ways to obtain more consistent quality in parts destined for nuclear weapons. "We’re going to look at it on a part-by-part basis. For those parts vendors that will have a hard time [meeting the requirements], we would look to bring those back in house," he added, referring to the more costly option of the U.S. government re-taking responsibility for custom building certain components.
Verdon also told legislators that NNSA had been able to leverage its experiences with the W88 ALT 370 and B61-12 programs to produce "design simplifications" on the future W80-4 and W87-1 warheads. The W80-4 is a life-extension upgrade for existing W80s found in the Air Force's AGM-86B Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM) and it will also be used in the service's future air-launched Long Range Stand Off (LRSO) cruise missiles. The W87-1 is a similar effort for W87 warheads, which are presently found on some Air Force LGM-30G Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and are set to go atop the future Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) ICBMs. NNSA hopes this will lead to new cost savings that will help offset the issues with the W88 ALT 370s and B61-12s.
USAF
US Air Force personnel work on an LGM-30G Minuteman ICBM in its silo.
Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear weapons, any cost savings have to be balanced against the absolute need for the best possible safety and surety features. With America's nuclear enterprise, this is called the concept of "Always/Never," which refers to the desire for nuclear weapons to always function when you want them to and never when you don't.
Design flaws with multiple nuclear weapon configurations meant a number of already harrowing accidents during the Cold War could have been particularly catastrophic. One of these incidents, a 1980 fire in the engine of a B-52 loaded with nuclear weapons sitting on alert at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, was one turn of the wind away from becoming "worse than Chernobyl," according to Dr. Roger Batzel, then-director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL. You can read more about this particular accident in this recent War Zone feature.
For the time being, the capacitor issue has not had any larger impacts on the futures of W88 ALT 370 or B61-12 programs. However, “there are vitally important programs for America, but there are no sacred cows, so we need to make sure 18-month, two year delays, cost overruns can be better understood so they can be avoided in the future," Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee and Chair of the House Armed Forces Committee's Strategic Forces Subcommittee, warned during the hearing.
Congress is already engaged in an intense debate about modernizing America's nuclear arsenal, broadly, which is expected to cost a whopping $1.5 trillion over the next three decades. As such, it is very possible that we will see additional changes to the character of both the W88 ALT 370 and B61-12 programs now that their schedules for both have grown by more than a year.
Contact the author: [email protected]
Don't forget to sign up
